The 2020 class of the UW Athletic Hall of Fame has been selected and new members will be announced from June 15 - 26. Visit UWBadgers.com each day to celebrate each new member of this distinguished and historic class of Badgers!
BY ANDY BAGGOT
UWBadgers.com Insider
MADISON, Wis. — Some of the most accomplished student-athletes in Wisconsin history were discovered by chance. Jackie Zoch Major was one of them.
To hear her tell it, Zoch Major was jogging alone on the gravel path that abuts Lake Mendota. It was in October of 1974. At one point she encountered a group of young women — complete strangers — striding in her direction. One of them called out to her and changed her life.
Sue Ela was a fifth-year senior in the newly christened varsity sport of women's openweight crew. She apparently was on a training run with some of her fellow rowers when Zoch Major came upon the scene.
No one knew it at the time, but a UW dropout from Madison, who grew up figure skating and swimming, was about to launch an elite rowing career that would put her on an Olympic medal stand and into multiple halls of fame.
"I was running and she kind of stopped me and said, 'Maybe you'd be interested in coming down to the boat house,'" Zoch Major recalled of her introduction to Ela. "That's how I was recruited."
Ela doesn't have nearly the same detailed recall as her former UW teammate.
"I don't have any memory of that at all," she said with a laugh.
That's not to say it didn't happen the way Zoch Major described it.
"Who knows? It could have been me. It could have been someone else," Ela said. "I'd love to take credit."
Gallery: (6-18-2020) 2020 Hall of Fame: Jackie Zoch
In those days, the men's and women's rowing coaches recruited exclusively by sizing up prospects in the freshmen registration lines at the Stock Pavilion or Red Gym and making their pitch. If you had the lanky, sinewy build of a former basketball forward or a middle blocker in volleyball, chances are you were approached.
At 5-foot-11, Zoch Major fit that description, but her case was unique. After graduating from Madison East High School, she initially enrolled at UW in the fall of 1967, but dropped out after two years.
"I was kind of bored," she said. "I wasn't studying to the degree that I knew I should be."
Zoch Major got a job and took classes part-time before getting the itch to return to UW full time in the fall of 1974. She wound up with a degree in family resources and consumer science.
"I just decided I needed to finish," she said.
"It's astonishing to me now the pressure put on kids to know what they want to be as a freshman. How do you? I've had several incarnations. At one point I thought I wanted to be a vet."
Zoch Major wound up getting an MBA, worked as an operations manager at a Boston bank and was a corporate tax auditor for the State of Alabama when she retired 18 months ago.
"My path was not clear," she said.
Upon her return to school as a 25-year-old, Zoch Major was a freshman athletically, but a junior academically. As such, she didn't appear in the registration lines that fall.
"She wouldn't have been recruited in registration lines, like most of the new freshmen novice rowers were," Ela said. "So having somebody bump into her on the lakeshore path, yeah, that makes sense because we were looking for people all the time that had rowing stature.
"I'm sure I wasn't out there officially recruiting. It would have been just a lucky moment."
Indeed. Less than two years later, Zoch Major was the stroke for the eight-person boat that won a bronze medal at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. It was the first time women's rowing was included in the Summer Games.
That achievement is why Zoch Major will be added to the University of Wisconsin Athletic Hall of Fame. She's part of an 11-person class that will be acknowledged this September.
Zoch Major is familiar with this kind of attention. She was inducted into the Madison Sports Hall of Fame in 2015, the National Rowing Hall of Fame in 2016 and the Madison East High School Hall of Fame in 2017.
"No matter who you are, it's always special to be in your college (hall of fame) and your hometown hall of fame," she said. "I was really thrilled about it and really grateful they chose me. I'm really thankful."
Zoch Major is the fourth member of the fabled women's rowing program to be included in the UW Hall of Fame, joining charter member Carie Graves in 1991, Ela in 2011 and Kris Thorsness in 2018.
Zoch Major, Ela and Graves were boat mates in 1975 when the Badgers won the National Women's Rowing Association title. UW unveiled 11 women's varsity sports in 1974 and rowing was the first to secure a national crown.
Zoch Major began her rookie year rowing in the novice, or freshman, boat, but when that crew dominated the field to win the prestigious Eastern Sprints title, UW coach Jay Mimier tabbed Zoch Major, Peggy McCarthy and Mary Grace Knight to row with the varsity eight.
"We had an incredible team," Zoch Major said, noting that seven of the eight were invited to try out for the U.S. national team.
The three promotions factored into the NWRA championship as well as the subsequent process for selecting the American entry into the Olympics. Zoch Major, Graves and McCarthy wound up making the team.
"To go from starting a new sport in the fall of '74 and then making the first U.S. Olympic Team in '76, now that's pretty outstanding," Ela said of Zoch Major. "It would be pretty difficult to do today."
When did Zoch Major know she had elite rowing skills? She recalled sending in her ergometer scores to the selection committee only because she knew hers were comparable to other invitees.
"I did very well at that," Zoch Major said. "Until that time, it didn't occur to me to try out. At that point I was like, if they're going to try out I might as well go. I did not know how I was going to do."
Zoch Major came from an athletic background. She said her father, Lawrence, received a football scholarship to Marquette and her mother, Orian, taught figure skating at a club she founded. Her parents, both raised on farms, regularly hiked and camped around the state.
"I had a great gene pool," Zoch Major said. "I was very lucky."
Zoch Major remembers riding her bike to Tenney Park nearly every day as a kid to swim and dive, which gave way to her competing for East High School as a swimmer.
Did she have a role model growing up?
"I don't know if I had a role model, but my mom was encouraging and, although I suspect my father wanted a boy, I was never told I couldn't do anything because I was a girl," she said.
Zoch Major, who has three younger brothers, thinks her upbringing helped in another way. She said her family always had a vegetable garden in their backyard and her father regularly went fishing to supply meals.
"We grew up organic and didn't even know it," she said.
Ela became the first full-time women's rowing coach at Wisconsin in 1979, a tenure that carried through to 1998. She said she didn't cut prospects because the grueling nature of training and rowing was a natural form of subtraction.
"The ones that stuck it out definitely had the perseverance and the mental strength and the goal-setting capabilities to make it in the program," she said. "You cast your net and develop those that you catch."
Zoch Major was one of the bigger success stories. She said offseason conditioning sessions included long, hilly runs on campus and high-intensity ergometer work.
"If you made it through winter training," she said, "you deserved to be there."
Zoch Major was gearing up for a run at making the American squad for the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow when she sustained a back injury that effectively ended her elite-level rowing career. Even if she stayed healthy and made the Olympic team, Zoch Major wouldn't have competed because the U.S. boycotted the event.
Zoch Major resumed rowing competitively in master's events in 1996 and currently works with aspiring athletes at the Birmingham (Alabama) Rowing Club.
"The one thing I've loved about all the people I've rowed with is I knew that no matter what happened, these people would die rather than quit rowing at maximum capacity," Zoch Major said. "That's all I ever cared about. If you beat me, you're going to have to prove it today. I don't care who you are, you're going to have to prove you can beat me. All the people I rowed with had that mentality."
2020 UW Athletic Hall of Fame
- Aaron Gibson, Football
- Carla MacLeod, Women's Hockey
- Ted Kellner, Special Service
- Jackie Zoch, Women's Rowing
- Mike Wilkinson, Men's Basketball
- John Byce, Men's Hockey and Baseball
- Tom Burke, Football
- Jessie Stomski, Women's Basketball
- Dick Bartman, Boxing
- Jeff Braun, Men's Track and Field
- Bo Ryan, Men's Basketball
